Past Pastoral
1
We can have our youth back.
Jim and Ed
can pull into the driveway,
wait for me, slumped;
Jim taps a couple toots
on the horn;
I step out of my house,
askew,
still combing;
another day of school.
But laughter bubbles up from us
as Jim’s old, gasping Studebaker
chugs along
between gold-green maples
of early spring.
2
Dad can still sit
in the backyard
in late-evening light,
shadows deep and long
as the book before him,
pipe smoke
pensive above him.
Peepers silver the air
with sounds far-off and elfin.
Last light gleams in pools
about his chair;
his island
of pure mentation
in the fading day.
3
It was like that
in Clifton Park, New York,
very long ago—
a time so many pages back
you almost can’t find it.
We lived on Moe Road
facing a cornfield
and far, low farmhouses
long gone now.
Once, coming back at dawn
from carousing with friends,
I walked out
to see cornstalks
in ghostly silent rows.
A vermilion sun
edged over the dark east,
aglitter,
superbly unknown
in the dusky land.
~
Inland
1
I could wake at seven, six, five, four…
but I wouldn’t see dawn on the sea.
2
In Be’er Sheva houses the color of sand
seek no further than the surrounding sand.
3
I could take the earliest bus from Be’er Sheva
and it still wouldn’t be dawn on the sea.
It would be morning,
the same Brit
roaming the boardwalk and saying
“Mate, can you spare me a shekel”
as when I used to live in Tel Aviv.
4
Beyond him wetsuit figures
like shiny black beetles
gamboling in the winter surf.
The refuse,
the same sting of breeze,
it would be morning
sitting on the bench
drinking cold diet Coke.
5
It would not be dawn
in my Be’er Sheva flat at 4 a.m.
It would not be near the sea.
But in my mind’s eye
the first pallor
touches the water
hushed as when
the teacher returned to the room.
~
The Last Jamboree
A ghost, I went to my 50-year class reunion.
Not really; I was alive.
“Hey Glenn!” “Hey Roy!” “Hey Stu!” “Hey Scott!” “Hey Cal!”
A band was playing, I couldn’t hear,
I could never stand standing while talking.
Glenn, Roy, Stu, Scott, Cal,
here’s what I’d have wanted to say:
Compared to those days, we’re all ghosts now.
I was moved to glimpse who you’d become.
Or, stopped being; retired now, playing golf.
Long shadows on the turf,
you trudge home hoisting your gear.
We’re a concentric circle ever-widening
from a point far in the past
that soon will be out of sight.
However loud and gaudy
the surreal parade of that night.
___________
P. David Hornik, a longtime American immigrant in Israel, is a writer, a translator from Hebrew to English, and a copyeditor in English. He grew up near Albany, New York, received an MA in English from Binghamton University, and moved to Israel at age thirty. He has published three novels, a short-story collection, an essay collection, and numerous short works including articles, book reviews, short stories, and poetry. His memoir, Israel—A Place to Call Home: A Real-Life Story of Aliyah, is now available in Kindle and paperback.